A new book tells the story of the economics discipline and its original purpose with a degree of verve and imaginativeness that puts dreary mainstream economists to shame. In the process, it gets at fundamental truths that major schools within the discipline have managed to obscure.
TOWNSHEND, VERMONT—The legitimacy of economics as an academic discipline and policymaking tool has been under sustained attack at least since the 2008 financial crisis. But few critiques seek to reckon with the origins of the discipline and the purpose behind it. Now, Antara Haldar, a legal studies scholar at the University of Cambridge, has called attention to both questions in a new book, Everyman: The Untold Story of Economics.
